Famous short stories about Henry. ABOUT
American novelist O. Henry (real name William Sydney Porter) born September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is the author of over two hundred and eighty stories, sketches, and humoresques. William Porter's life has been sad since childhood. At the age of three he lost his mother, and his father, a provincial doctor, became a widower, began drinking and soon turned into a useless alcoholic.
After leaving school, fifteen-year-old Billy Porter stood behind the pharmacy counter. Working surrounded by cough syrup and flea powders had a detrimental effect on his already compromised health.
In 1882, Billy went to Texas, lived on a ranch for two years, and then settled in Austin, working in the land department, as a cashier and bookkeeper at a bank. Nothing good came of his banking career. Porter was accused of embezzling $1,150, a very significant amount at that time. The writer's biographers still argue whether he was actually guilty. On the one hand, he needed money for the treatment of his sick wife (and for the publication of Rolling Stone), on the other hand, the cashier Porter resigned from the bank in December 1894, while the embezzlement was revealed only in 1895, and the owners of the bank were unclean hand. A criminal case was opened against Porter, and in February 1896 he fled in panic to New Orleans, and from there to Honduras. In this country, fate brought Porter together with a pleasant gentleman - professional bandit-robber Ell Jennings.
Much later, Jennings, putting aside his revolver, took up his pen and created memoirs in which he recalled interesting episodes of Latin American adventures. The friends took part in the local Honduran coup, then fled to Mexico, where Jennings saved the future writer from certain death. Porter carelessly made advances towards some married woman; the husband, who was somewhere nearby, a macho Mexican, took out a knife with a blade two feet long and wanted to defend his honor. Jennings settled the situation - he shot the jealous man in the head with a shot from the hip, after which he and William mounted their horses, and the conflict was left behind.
In Mexico, Porter received a telegram informing him that his beloved wife, Atoll Estes, was dying. During her husband’s absence, she had no means of subsistence, was starving, and having fallen ill, she could not buy medicine, but on the eve of Christmas she sold a lace cape for twenty-five dollars and sent Bill a gift in Mexico City - a gold watch chain. Unfortunately, it was at that moment that Porter sold his watch to buy a train ticket. He managed to see and say goodbye to his wife. A few days later she died. Police agents with a plaintive bandage walked silently behind the coffin. Immediately after the funeral, they arrested the cashier-embezzler, who did not say a single word in court and received five years in prison.
Porter spent three years and three months in exile. He was released early (for exemplary behavior and good work in the prison pharmacy) in the summer of 1901. He never remembered his prison years. Ell Jennings’ memories helped that, ironically, he again found himself side by side with the writer in a convict prison in Columbus, Ohio.
Sitting with Porter and Jennings was a twenty-year-old “safecracker” (safecracker) Wild Price. He did a good job - he saved the little daughter of a wealthy businessman from a safe that suddenly closed. Price cut off his nails with a knife and opened the top-secret lock in twelve seconds. They promised him a pardon, but they deceived him. Based on this plot, Porter wrote his first story - about the burglar Jimmy Valentine, who saved his fiancee's niece from a fireproof cabinet. The story, unlike Dick Price's, had a happy ending.
Before sending the story to the newspaper, Porter read it to his fellow inmates. Ell Jennings recalled: “From the moment Porter began to read in his low, velvety, slightly stuttering voice, there was dead silence. We absolutely froze, holding our breath. Finally, the robber Reidler sighed loudly, and Porter, as if waking up from a dream, looked at us.” Reidler smiled and began to rub his eyes with his crippled hand. “Damn you, Porter, this is the first time in my life, God punish me if I knew what a tear looks like!” The stories were not immediately accepted for publication. The next three were published under a pseudonym.
While in prison, Porter was embarrassed to publish under his own name. In a pharmacy reference book, he came across the name of the then famous French pharmacist O. Henri. It was her, in the same transcription, but in English pronunciation (O. Henry), that the writer chose as his pseudonym for the rest of his life. As he walked out of the prison gates, he uttered a phrase that has been quoted for perhaps a century: “Prison could do a great service to society if society chose who to put there.”
At the end of 1903, O. Henry signed a contract with the New York newspaper "World" for the weekly delivery of a short Sunday story - one hundred dollars per work. This fee was quite large at that time. The writer's annual earnings were equal to the profits of popular American novelists.
But the frantic pace of work could kill a healthier person than O. Henry, who could not refuse other periodicals. During 1904, O. Henry published sixty-six stories, and in 1905 - sixty-four. Sometimes, sitting in the editorial office, he would finish writing two stories at once, and the editorial artist would shift nearby, waiting to start illustrating.
Readers of the American newspaper could not cope with large texts; they could not stand philosophizing and tragic stories. O. Henry began to lack stories, and in the future he more often borrowed, or even bought them from friends and acquaintances. Gradually he began to get tired and slowed down. However, 273 stories came from his pen - over thirty stories in a year. The stories enriched newspapermen and publishers, but not O. Henry himself, an impractical man who was accustomed to a semi-bohemian life. He never bargained, never found out anything. He silently received his money, thanked him and went: “I owe Mr. Gilman Hall, according to him, 175 dollars. I think I owe him no more than 30 dollars. But he can count, but I can’t...”.
He avoided the societies of his literary brothers-in-arms, strove for solitude, shunned social gatherings, and did not give interviews. He wandered around New York for several days without a good reason, then locked the door of his room and wrote.
In his wanderings and alienation, he recognized and “digested” the big city, Babylon-on-the-Hudson, Baghdad-over-the-subway - its sounds and lights, hope and tears, sensation and failure. He was a poet of the New York bottom and the lowest social strata, a dreamer and visionary of brick back streets. In the dull quarters of Harlem and Coney Island, by the will of O. Henry, Cinderellas and Don Quixotes, Harun al-Rashids and Diogenes appeared, who were always ready to come to the rescue of those who were dying, in order to provide a realistic story with an unexpected ending.
O. Henry spent the last week of his life alone, in a squalid hotel room. He was sick, drank a lot, and could no longer work. At the forty-eighth year of his life in a New York hospital, he passed into another world, unlike his heroes, without receiving miraculous help.
The writer's funeral resulted in a real Henryian plot. During the funeral service, a cheerful wedding party burst into the church, and did not immediately realize that they would have to wait at the entrance.
O. Henry could be called a kind of belated romantic, an American storyteller of the 20th century, but the nature of his unique short story creativity is broader than these definitions. Humanism, independent democracy, the artist’s alertness to the social conditions of his time, his humor and comedy prevail over satire, and “comforting” optimism over bitterness and indignation. It was they who created a unique novelistic portrait of New York at the dawn of the monopoly era - a diverse, attractive, mysterious and cruel metropolis with its four million “little Americans.” The reader's interest and sympathy for the ups and downs of life, clerks, saleswomen, barge haulers, unknown artists, poets, actresses, cowboys, small adventurers, farmers, and the like, is considered a special gift, which is characteristic of O. Henry as a storyteller. The image that appears as if before our eyes is frankly conventional, acquires a fleeting illusory authenticity - and remains forever in memory. In the poetics of O. Henry's short story there is a very important element of acute theatricality, which is undoubtedly connected with his worldview as a fatalist who blindly believes in Chance or Fate. Freeing his heroes from “global” thoughts and decisions, O. Henry never turns them away from moral guidelines: in his small world there are firm laws of ethics and humanity, even for those characters whose actions do not always agree with the laws. The language of his short story is extremely rich, associative and inventive, full of parodic passages, illusions, hidden quotes and all sorts of puns that pose extremely difficult tasks for translators - after all, it is in the language of O. Henry that the “formative ferment” of his style is contained. For all its originality, O. Henry's novella is a purely American phenomenon, which grew out of the national literary tradition (from E. Poe to B. Hart and M. Twain).
Letters and an unfinished manuscript indicate that in the last years of his life O. Henry approached a new milestone. He craved “simple, honest prose,” and sought to free himself from certain stereotypes and the “Rosy Endings” that the commercial press, oriented toward bourgeois tastes, expected from him.
Most of his stories, which were published in periodicals, were included in collections that were published during his lifetime: “Four Million” (1906), “The Burning Lamp” (1907), “The Heart of the West” (1907), “The Voice of the City” ( 1908), “The Noble Rogue” (1908), “The Road of Fate” (1909), “The Choice” (1909), “Business People” (1910), “Broomrape” (1910). More than a dozen collections were published posthumously. The novel "Kings and Cabbage" (1904) consists of a conventionally connected plot of adventurously humorous short stories, the action of which takes place in Latin America.
The fate of O. Henry's inheritance was no less difficult than the personal fate of W. S. Porter. After a decade of fame, the time has come for a ruthless critical reassessment of value - a reaction to the type of "well-made story." However, approximately from the end of the 50s of the last century in the United States, literary interest in the work and biography of the writer was again revived. As for the reader's love for him, it is unchanged: O. Henry, as before, occupies a permanent place among the authors who are loved to be reread in many countries of the world.
O. Henry (eng. O. Henry, pseudonym, real name William Sidney Porter- English William Sydney Porter; 1862-1910) - American writer, prose writer, author of popular short stories characterized by subtle humor and unexpected endings.
Biography
William Sidney Porter was born on September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. After school, I studied to become a pharmacist and worked in a pharmacy. Then he worked as a cashier-accountant in a bank in the Texas city of Austin. He was accused of embezzlement and hid from law enforcement for six months in Honduras, then in South America. Returning to the United States, he was convicted and sent to prison in Columbus, Ohio, where he spent three years (1898-1901).
In prison, Porter worked in the infirmary and wrote stories, looking for a pseudonym. In the end, I decided on the version of O. Henry (often incorrectly spelled like the Irish surname O'Henry - O'Henry). Its origin is not entirely clear. The writer himself claimed in an interview that the name Henry was taken from the society news column in the newspaper, and the initial O. was chosen as the simplest letter. He told one of the newspapers that O. stands for Olivier (the French name Olivier), and indeed, he published several stories there under the name Olivier Henry. According to other sources, this is the name of a famous French pharmacist. Another hypothesis was put forward by writer and scientist Guy Davenport: “Oh. Henry" is nothing more than an abbreviation of the name of the prison where the author was imprisoned - Oh io Peniten tiary. He wrote his first story under this pseudonym, “Dick the Whistler's Christmas Gift,” published in 1899 in McClure's Magazine.
O. Henry's first book of stories, Cabbages and Kings, was published in 1904. It was followed by The four million (1906), The trimmed Lamp (1907), The Heart West" (Heart of the West, 1907), "The Voice of the City" (1908), "The Gentle Grafter" (1908), "Roads of Destiny" (1909), " Selections (Options, 1909), Strictly Business (1910) and Whirlliggs (1910).
At the end of his life he suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes. The writer died on June 5, 1910 in New York.
The collection “Postscripts”, published after the death of O. Henry, included feuilletons, sketches and humorous notes written by him for the newspaper “Post” (Houston, Texas, 1895-1896). In total, O. Henry wrote 273 stories, the complete collection of his works is 18 volumes.
Features of creativity
O. Henry occupies an exceptional place in American literature as a master of the short-story genre. Before his death, O. Henry expressed his intention to move on to a more complex genre - to the novel (“everything I have written so far is just self-indulgence, a test of the pen, compared to what I will write in a year”).
In his work, however, these sentiments did not manifest themselves in any way, and O. Henry remained an organic artist of the “small” genre, the story. It is no coincidence, of course, that during this period the writer first began to be interested in social problems and revealed his negative attitude towards bourgeois society (Jennings “Through the Darkness with O. Henry”).
O. Henry's heroes are diverse: millionaires, cowboys, speculators, clerks, laundresses, bandits, financiers, politicians, writers, artists, artists, workers, engineers, firefighters - they replace each other. A skillful plot designer, O. Henry does not show the psychological side of what is happening; the actions of his characters do not receive deep psychological motivation, which further enhances the surprise of the ending.
O. Henry is not the first original master of the “short story”; he only developed this genre, which in its main features had already taken shape in the work of T. B. Aldrich (Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1836-1907). O. Henry's originality was manifested in the brilliant use of jargon, sharp words and expressions, and in the general colorfulness of the dialogues.
Already during the writer’s lifetime, the “short story” in his style began to degenerate into a scheme, and by the 1920s it turned into a purely commercial phenomenon: the “method” of its production was taught in colleges and universities, numerous manuals were published, etc.
American writers of the interwar period (S. Anderson, T. Dreiser, B. Hecht) contrasted the vacuity of O. Henry's epigones with rich psychological stories.
O. Henry Award
Eight years after his death, the O. Henry Prize was established in memory of the writer
The story of the dirty ten
Money talks. But you might think that in New York the voice of an old ten-dollar bill sounds like a barely audible whisper? Well, great, if you like, ignore the autobiography of a stranger told sotto voce. If your ear loves the roar of John D.'s checkbook coming from a megaphone driving around the streets, it's up to you. Just don’t forget that even a small coin sometimes doesn’t fit into your pocket for a word. The next time you slip an extra silver quarter to the grocery clerk so that he can weigh you out with the owner's goods, first read the words above the lady's head. A caustic remark, isn't it?
I am a 1901 ten dollar bill. You may have seen these in the hands of one of your friends. On the front I have a picture of the American bison, mistakenly called buffalo by fifty or sixty million Americans. On the sides are the heads of Captain Lewis and Captain Clark. From the back side in the center of the stage stands, gracefully perched on a greenhouse plant, either Liberty, or Ceres, or Maxine Elliott.
For information about me, please contact: paragraph 3. 588, amended bylaws. If you decide to change me, Uncle Sam will put ten ringing full-weight coins on your counter - really, I don’t know whether they are silver, gold, lead or iron.
I'm telling the story a little confusingly, will you forgive me - forgive me? I knew it, thank you - after all, even a nameless bill evokes a kind of servile awe, a desire to please, doesn’t it? You see, we, the dirty money, are almost completely deprived of the opportunity to polish our speech. In my life I have never met an educated and well-mannered person whose ten would linger longer than it takes to run to the nearest culinary shop. For a six-year-old, I have a very sophisticated and animated manner. I pay off my debts as regularly as those who see off a dead man on his last journey. I have served so many masters! But I once had the opportunity to admit my ignorance, and to whom? In front of an old, shabby and unkempt five - a silver certificate. We met her in a thick, foul-smelling butcher's wallet.
Hey, you, daughter of an Indian chief, I say, stop groaning. Don’t you understand that it’s time to withdraw you from circulation and print again? Only released in 1899, but what do you look like?
You apparently think that since you are a buffalo, you are supposed to chatter incessantly,” responded the five. - And you would be worn out if you were kept under a fildepers and a garter all day, when the temperature in the store does not drop a degree below eighty-five.
“I haven’t heard of such wallets,” I said. -Who put you there?
Saleswoman.
What is a saleswoman? - I was forced to ask.
Your sister will know this no earlier than their sister’s golden age begins,” answered the five.
Look, lady! She doesn't like fildepers. But if they stuck you behind a piece of cotton, as they did with me, and pestered you all day with factory dust, so that this lady with a cornucopia painted on me even sneezed, what would you sing then?
This conversation took place the day after I arrived in New York. I was sent to a Brooklyn bank by one of their Pennsylvania branches in a pack of dozens just like me. Since then, I have never had the opportunity to become acquainted with the wallets that my five-dollar and two-dollar interlocutors were in. They hid me only behind silk ones.
I was lucky. I didn't sit still. Sometimes I changed hands twenty times a day. I knew the underside of every deal; Again, I took care of every pleasure of my hosts. On Saturdays I was invariably dumped on the counter. Tens are always thrown around, but bills of a dollar or two are folded into a square and modestly pushed towards the bartender. Gradually, I got a taste for it and strove to either sip the whiskey or lick the martini or Manhattan that had spilled there from the counter. One day, a peddler driving a cart along the street put me in a plump, greasy packet, which he carried in his overalls pocket. I thought I would have to forget about the real appeal, since the future owner of the general store lived on eight cents a day, limiting his menu to dog meat and onions. But then the peddler somehow made a mistake by placing his cart too close to the intersection, and I was saved. I am still grateful to the policeman who helped me out. He changed me in a tobacconist's shop near the Bowery, where gambling was going on in the back room. And the chief of the police station, who himself was lucky that evening, took me out into the world. A day later, he got me drunk at a restaurant on Broadway. I was also sincerely glad to be returning to my native land, like one of the Astors when he sees the lights of Charing Cross.
The Dirty Ten don't have to sit around on Broadway. Once they called me child support, folded me up and put me in a suede wallet full of dimes. They boastfully recalled the stormy summer season in Osining, where the landlady's three daughters constantly fished one of them out for ice cream. However, these infantile revelries are simply a storm in a teacup when compared with the hurricanes to which banknotes of our denomination are subjected during the menacing hour of increased demand for lobsters.
The first time I heard about dirty money was when the charming youngster Wang Whoever dumped me and several of my girlfriends in exchange for a handful of chips.
About midnight, a rollicking and burly fellow with the fat face of a monk and the eyes of a janitor who had just received a raise, rolled me and many other banknotes into a tight roll - a “piece”, as the money polluters say.
Write down five hundred for me,” he said to the banker, “and see that everything is as it should be, Charlie.” I want to walk through a wooded valley while the moonlight plays on a rocky cliff. If any of us get into trouble, keep in mind that in the upper left compartment of my safe there are sixty thousand dollars, wrapped in a humorous magazine supplement. Keep your nose to the wind, but don't waste your words. Bye.
I found myself between two twenties - gold certificates. One of them told me:
Hey, you "new" old lady, you're in luck. You'll see something interesting. Today Old Jack is going to turn all the Beefsteak into crumbs.
William Sidney Porter (pseudonym O. Henry) is an unsurpassed master of short stories! Combining real life stories with fiction, this author's short stories excite interest and keep you in suspense until the very end of the story.
O. Henry skillfully plays with surprise. This is his unique style, his signature feature. The writer has created many entertaining stories, which at the same time are distinguished by their depth of inner meaning. The writer appears in his wonderful works as a true humanist and realist.
short biography
William Sidney Porter was born in 1862 in a place near the city of Greensboro. His father was a failed pharmacist who abused alcohol, and his mother was a creative person. She drew well and wrote poetry, but died early.
His aunt Evelyn was involved in raising the boy. From a young age William was fond of reading . He was especially attracted to the books of W. Shakespeare, O. Balzac and Flaubert. From the age of sixteen, the young man began to learn the craft of a pharmacist from his uncle.
Working in a pharmacy, William had the opportunity to observe visitors and listen to their everyday stories. He sympathized with their suffering and dreamed of a world where only happy people would live. At nineteen, Porter received a document officially confirming his profession as a pharmacist.
A year later, William fell ill with tuberculosis. In order to heal, he changed his surroundings by moving to the American Southwest. Since then, he had to change many professions. Working as a bank teller led to dire consequences that affected his future life.
Porter was accused of embezzling a large sum . It is still unknown whether the writer was guilty of the charges brought against him, but the fact remains a fact. William had to flee from justice to Honduras, but later returned to his homeland due to his wife’s illness.
She was dying of tuberculosis. After the funeral, he appeared in court, having come to the police voluntarily. He was sentenced to five years. His pharmaceutical knowledge came in handy in prison. William was assigned to work in the prison pharmacy. While on duty at night, Porter had the opportunity to write actively . The most famous works of O. Henry:
- "The leader of the Redskins".
- and much more.
He dedicated his first published story to his daughter. He began writing under the pseudonym O. Henry . After leaving prison, he devoted himself entirely to literary creativity. At the beginning of his career, O. Henry experienced financial difficulties. The time of fame and success came a little later, from 1903.
The writer died at the age of 47, completely alone. In the last days of his life he suffered from severe depression. O. Henry was buried on June 5, 1910. He left behind a huge literary heritage, including about 300 short stories. The complete works consist of 18 volumes!
About ten years ago, in St. Petersburg, I met an American. The conversation was not going well, the guests were about to leave, but by chance I mentioned the name of O. Henry. The American smiled, invited me to his place and, introducing me to his friends, said to each of them:
- Here is a man who loves O. Henry.
And they began to smile at me in a friendly way. This name was a talisman. One Russian lady asked the owner: “Who is this O. Henry? Your relative? Everyone laughed, but, in essence, the lady was right: O. Henry, indeed, is a relative for every American. Other writers are loved differently, cooler, but they have a homely attitude towards this. When they call his name, they smile. His biographer, Professor Alfonzo Smith, says that O. Henry attracted conservatives, extreme radicals, maids, society ladies, scribes, and business people. There is no doubt that in a few years he will be one of our most beloved writers in Russia.
O. Henry's real name was William Sidney Porter. Even his admirers did not know this for a long time. He was secretive and did not like popularity. Someone wrote him a letter: “Please answer whether you are a man or a woman.” But the letter remained unanswered. In vain did newspaper and magazine publishers ask O. Henry for permission to print his portrait. He flatly refused everyone, saying: “Why did I invent a pseudonym for myself, if not to hide.” He never told anyone his biography, not even his closest friends. Reporters did not have access to him and were forced to invent tall tales about him.
He never visited either secular or literary salons and preferred to wander from tavern to tavern, talking to the first people he met, who did not know that he was a famous writer. To maintain his incognito, he adopted a common language and, if he wanted, gave the impression of being illiterate. Loved to drink. He felt best in the company of workers: with them he sang, drank, danced, and whistled, so that they mistook him for a factory worker and asked what factory he worked at. He became a writer late; he learned fame only in the forty-fifth year of his life. He was of extraordinary kindness: he gave away everything he had, and, no matter how much he earned, he was constantly in need. In his attitude towards money, he was similar to our Gleb Uspensky: he could neither save it nor count it. One day in New York he stood on the street and talked to an acquaintance. A beggar approached him. He took a coin out of his pocket and angrily thrust it into the beggar’s hand: “Go away, don’t bother me, here’s a dollar for you.” The beggar left, but a minute later he returned: “Mister, you were so kind to me, I don’t want to deceive you, this is not a dollar, this is twenty dollars, take it back, you were mistaken.” O. Henry pretended to be angry: “Go, go, I told you not to pester me!”
At the restaurant, he tipped the footman twice as much as the lunch cost. His wife lamented: as soon as any beggar came to him and lied about his misadventures, O. Henry gave everything to the last cent, gave him his trousers, jacket, and then accompanied him to the door, begging: “Come again.” And they came again.
Supernaturally observant, he allowed himself to be childishly naive when it came to someone in need.
He was a taciturn person, kept his distance from people and seemed stern to many. In appearance, he looked like an average actor: plump, shaven, short, narrow eyes, calm movements.
He was born in the south, in the sleepy town of Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862. His father was a doctor - an absent-minded, kind, small, funny man with a long gray beard. The doctor was fond of inventing all kinds of machines, from which nothing came of; He was always tinkering in the barn with some ridiculous projectile that promised him Edisonian glory.
Willie Porter's mother, an educated, cheerful woman, died of consumption three years after the birth of her son. The boy studied with his aunt, the aunt was an old maid who beat her students, who, it seems, were worth the rod. Willie Porter was a tomboy like the rest. His favorite pastime was playing Redskins. To do this, he pulled feathers from the tails of live turkeys, decorated his head with these feathers and rushed after the bison with a wild squeal. The role of bison was played by the neighbor's pigs. The boy and a crowd of comrades chased the unfortunate animals and shot at them with a homemade bow. The sows squealed as if they were being slaughtered, the arrows pierced their bodies deeply, and woe to the boys if the owners of the pigs found out about this hunt.
Another of Willie Porter's pastimes was breaking the shells his father invented. The old man was positively obsessed with these shells: he invented the perpetuum mobile, and the steam car, and the airplane, and an apparatus for mechanical washing of clothes - he abandoned practice and almost never left the barn.
One day, Willie and a friend ran away from home to join a whaling ship (he was ten years old at the time), but he didn’t have enough money, and he had to return home as a hare - almost on the roof of the carriage.
Willie had an uncle who was a pharmacist and the owner of a drug store. As a fifteen-year-old teenager, Willie entered his service and soon learned how to make powders and pills. But most importantly, he learned to draw. Every free minute he drew caricatures of his uncle and his customers. The cartoons were evil and good. Everyone predicted Willie's fame as an artist. A drugstore in an out-of-the-way place is not so much a store as it is a club. Everyone comes there with their illnesses, questions, complaints. It is impossible to think of a better school for a future fiction writer.
Willie read avidly - “The Red-Eyed Pirate”, “The Forest Devil”, “The Jamaican Storm”, “Jack the Ripper” - he read and coughed, because from the age of eighteen he began to face consumption. Therefore, he was very happy when one of the regulars at his uncle’s club, Dr. Hall, invited him to go to Texas for a while to improve his health. Dr. Hall had three sons in Texas - giants, fine fellows, strong men. One of the sons was a judge - the famous Lee Hall, whom the whole district was afraid of; armed from head to toe, he scoured the roads day and night, tracking down the horse thieves and robbers with whom Texas was then infested. In March 1882, Willie Porter came to him and became a cowboy on his farm. He was half-servant, half-guest; he worked like a servant, but was on friendly terms with his masters. Jokingly, I learned how to manage a herd, throw a lasso, shear and bathe sheep, follow horses, and shoot without leaving the saddle. He learned to cook dinner and often cooked, replacing the cook. He studied the wild life of Texas to the smallest detail, and subsequently he used this knowledge magnificently in the book “The Heart of the West.” He learned to speak Spanish—not just the corrupt Spanish slang they speak in Texas, but the real Castilian dialect.
Then he began to write, but mercilessly destroyed his manuscripts. What he wrote is unknown. Of all the books he read with the greatest interest at that time, it was not novels and stories, but an explanatory English dictionary, like our Dahl - the best reading for a young writer.
He stayed on the farm for two years. From there he went to Austin, the capital of Texas, and lived there for eleven years. What kind of professions has he tried over these eleven years! He was a clerk in a tobacco warehouse, and an accountant in a house sales office, he was a singer in various churches, a cashier in a bank, a draftsman for a land surveyor, and an actor in a small theater - nowhere did he show any special talents or special passion for the work , but, without noticing it, he accumulated enormous material for future literary work. It was as if he deliberately avoided literature then, preferring small, inconspicuous positions to it. He had no ambition and always liked to remain in the shadows.
In 1887, he married a young girl, whom he secretly took away from his parents, and soon began writing for newspapers and magazines. But his writings were small - ordinary newspaper trash. In 1894, he became the editor of the local humorous newspaper “Rolling Stone”, for which he supplied drawings, articles, and poems, which were absolutely unremarkable. The newspaper soon withered away.
In 1895, he moved to another town - Gauston, where he edited the Daily Mail, and everything was going well, he was getting out on the literary path - suddenly a thunderstorm broke out over him.
A subpoena came from Austin. William Porter was summoned to court on charges of embezzlement. The prosecution found that while he was cashier of the First National Bank, he had embezzled more than a thousand dollars at various times.
Everyone who knew him considered this accusation a miscarriage of justice. They were sure that, having appeared before the court, he would prove his innocence in half an hour. Everyone was greatly surprised when it turned out that the accused had escaped. Before reaching the city of Austin, he switched to another train and at night rushed south to New Orleans, leaving his daughter and wife in Austin.
We don't know why he ran away. His biographer claims that he was innocent and ran away because he wanted to protect his wife’s good name. If so, then, on the contrary, he should have stayed and proved his innocence in court. The wife would not have to endure so much shame and grief. Obviously, he had reasons to fear trial. The biographer says that the bank administration was to blame for everything: the reporting was carried out negligently, the bosses themselves took two hundred or three hundred dollars from the cash register, without recording this in the office books. There was monstrous chaos in the books; the cashier who had worked at this bank before Porter was so confused that he wanted to shoot himself. No wonder Porter got confused too. Who knows: maybe, taking advantage of the availability of money, he himself borrowed a hundred or two dollars from the cash register two or three times, with sincere confidence that he would put these dollars back in the coming days. The biographer claims that he was absolutely innocent, but why did he run then?
From New Orleans, he made his way on a cargo ship to Honduras and, arriving at the pier, felt safe. Soon he saw that another steamer was approaching the pier and a very strange man in a tattered tailcoat and a dented top hat ran out like an arrow. Ballroom clothes, unsuitable for a ship. It was clear that the man got on the ship in a hurry, without having time to change clothes, straight from the theater or from a ball.
-What made you leave so hastily? - the cashier who ran away asked him.
“The same as you,” he replied.
It turned out that the gentleman in the tailcoat was Al. Jennings, a notorious outlaw, was the leader of a gang of train thieves who terrorized the entire southwest with their daring thefts. The police tracked him down and he was forced to flee Texas so quickly that he didn't even get a chance to change his clothes. With him was his brother, also a thief, also in a top hat and tails. William Porter joined the fugitives, and the three of them began to circle around South America. That's when his knowledge of Spanish came in handy. They ran out of money, they fell off their feet from hunger. Jennings suggested robbing a German bank, a sure thing, the spoils would be split equally.
— Do you want to work with us? - he asked William Porter.
“No, not really,” he answered sadly and politely.
These forced wanderings around South America were later useful to Porter. If he had not fled from trial, we would not have had the novel “Kings and Cabbage,” which was influenced by close acquaintance with the banana republics of Latin America.
At this time, his wife was sitting in the city of Austin, without money, with a small daughter, sick. He invited her to come to the Republic of Honduras, but she was very ill and could not take such a journey. She embroidered a scarf, sold it and, using the first proceeds, bought a bottle of perfume for her runaway husband and sent him into exile. He had no idea that she was seriously ill. But when he was informed about this, he decided to put himself in the hands of the judicial authorities, go to prison, just to see his wife. So he did. In February 1898 he returned to Austin. He was tried, found guilty - and during the trial he was silent, did not say a word in his defense - and was sentenced to five years in prison. The fact that he was on the run only added to the guilt. He was taken into custody and sent to Ohio, to the city of Colombos, to a penal prison. The conditions in this prison were terrible. In one of his letters, William Porter wrote:
“I never thought that human life was such a cheap thing. People are looked at as animals without a soul and without feelings. The working day here is thirteen hours, and whoever fails to do his homework is beaten. Only a strong man can endure the work, but for most it is certain death. If a person falls down and cannot work, they take him to the cellar and send such a strong stream of water into him that he loses consciousness. Then the doctor brings him to his senses, and the unfortunate man is hung by his hands from the ceiling, he hangs on this rack for two hours. His feet barely touch the ground. After this, he is again driven to work and if he falls, he is placed on a stretcher and carried to the infirmary, where he is free to either die or recover. Consumption is a common thing here - it’s like having a runny nose. Twice a day, patients come to the hospital - from two hundred to three hundred people. They line up and walk past the doctor without stopping. He prescribes medicine - on the go, on the run - one after another, and the same line moves towards the prison pharmacy. There, in the same manner, without stopping - on the move, on the run - patients receive medicine.
I tried to come to terms with prison, but no, I can’t. What binds me to this life? I am capable of enduring any kind of suffering in the wild, but I no longer want to drag out this life. The sooner I finish it, the better it will be for me and for everyone.”
That was, it seems, the only case when this strong and secretive man expressed his feelings out loud and complained about his pain.
When asked in prison what he did outside, he replied that he was a reporter. The prison did not need reporters. But then he caught himself and added that he was also a pharmacist. It saved him; he was placed at the hospital, and soon he discovered such talents that both doctors and patients began to treat him with respect. He worked all night long, preparing medicines, visiting the sick, helping prison doctors, and this gave him the opportunity to get to know almost all the prisoners and collect enormous material for his future books. Many criminals told him their biography.
In general, life seemed to take special care to prepare him as a fiction writer. If he had not been in prison, he would not have written one of his best books, The Gentle Grafter.
But his knowledge of life did not come cheap. In prison, he was especially tormented not by his own, but by the torment of others. He describes with disgust the cruel regime of the American prison:
“Suicides are as commonplace with us as picnics are with you. Almost every night the doctor and I are called to some cell where one or another prisoner has tried to commit suicide. This one cut his throat, this one hanged himself, this one poisoned himself with gas. They think through such undertakings well and therefore almost never fail. Yesterday an athlete, a boxing specialist, suddenly went crazy; Of course, they sent for us, for the doctor and for me. The athlete was so well trained that it took eight people to tie him up.”
These horrors, which he observed day after day, painfully worried him. But he persevered, did not complain, and sometimes managed to send cheerful and frivolous letters from prison. These letters were intended for his little daughter, who was not supposed to know that her dad was in prison. Therefore, he took every precaution to ensure that his letters to her were not gloomy:
“Hello, Margaret! - he wrote. - Do you remember me? I am Murzilka, and my name is Aldibirontifostifornikofokos. If you see a star in the sky and before it sets, you manage to repeat my name seventeen times, you will find a diamond ring in the first footprint of a blue cow. A cow will walk in the snow - after a blizzard - and crimson roses will bloom on tomato bushes all around. Well, goodbye, it's time for me to leave. I ride a grasshopper."
But no matter how hard he tried to seem carefree, melancholy and anxiety often slipped through these letters.
In prison, he unexpectedly met with his old acquaintance, the railway robber Al. Jennings. Here they became even closer, and Jennings, under the influence of Porter, became a different person. He abandoned his profession and also followed the literary path. He recently published his prison memoirs about O. Henry, an entire book in which he described very soulfully the moral torment O. Henry experienced in prison. About prison procedures Al. Jennings recalls with fury. All criticism unanimously recognized that this thief is an excellent writer, that his book is not only a curious human document, but also an excellent work of art. By the way, Al. Jennings says that in prison there was a remarkable burglar of fireproof cash registers, an artist in his field, who was so brilliant at opening any locked iron cash register that he seemed like a miracle worker, a wizard, an unearthly being. This great artist languished in prison - melted like a candle, yearning for his favorite work. And suddenly they came to him and said that somewhere in some bank there was a cash desk that even the judicial authorities were not able to open. It needs to be opened, there are no keys, and the prosecutor decided to call the brilliant prisoner from prison so that he would assist the judicial authorities. And he was promised freedom if he opened this cash register. One can imagine how inspired and passionately the talented burglar attacked the cash register, with what ecstasy he crushed its iron walls, but as soon as he opened it, the ungrateful authorities forgot about their promise and drove him back to prison. The unfortunate man could not bear this mockery, he finally collapsed and withered away.
Porter subsequently depicted this episode in his famous story "A Retrieved Reformation", but famously changed the ending. The prison authorities in the story are kinder than they were in reality.
He was released early due to good behavior in prison. Good behavior mainly consisted in the fact that, being a prison pharmacist, he did not steal government alcohol - a virtue unprecedented in the annals of prison pharmacies.
After leaving prison, he took up writing seriously for the first time in his life. Already in prison, he sketched something, and now he got down to work in earnest. First of all, he appropriated the pseudonym O. Henry (the name of the French pharmacist Henri), under which he completely hid from everyone. He avoided meeting his former acquaintances; no one had any idea that a former convict was hiding under the pseudonym O. Henry. In the spring of 1902, he first came to New York. He was forty-one years old. Until now, he had lived only in the provinces in the south, in sleepy and naive towns, and the capital enchanted him. Days and nights he wandered the streets, insatiably absorbing the life of the great city. He fell in love with New York, became a New York poet, and explored every corner of it. And millionaires, and artists, and shopkeepers, and workers, and policemen, and cocottes - he recognized them all, studied them, and brought them to his pages. His literary productivity was colossal. He wrote about fifty stories a year - laconic, clear, extremely saturated with images. His stories appeared week after week in the World newspaper and were received with great enthusiasm. There has never been a writer in America who has brought the short story technique to such perfection. Each story by O. Henry is 300 - 400 lines, and in each there is a huge, complex story - many superbly outlined faces and almost always an original, intricate, intricate plot. Critics began to call him “the American Kipling”, “the American Maupassant”, “the American Gogol”, “the American Chekhov”. His fame grew with each story. In 1904, he collected his stories depicting South America into one volume, tied them together with a funny plot, and published them under the guise of the novel “Kings and Cabbages.” This was his first book. There is a lot of vaudeville in it, deliberately staged, but it also contains southern mountains, and the southern sun, and the southern sea, and the genuine carefreeness of the dancing, singing south. The book was a success. In 1906, O. Henry’s second book, “Four Million,” appeared, all dedicated to his New York. The book opens with a remarkable preface, which has now become famous. The fact is that New York has its own aristocracy, the money one, who live a very secluded life. It is almost impossible for a mere mortal to penetrate her circle. It is small in number, no more than four hundred people, and all the newspapers grovel before it. O. Henry did not like this, and he wrote:
“Recently someone has taken it into his head to assert that there are only four hundred people worthy of attention in the city of New York. But then another, smarter one came along - a census compiler - and proved that there were not four hundred such people, but much more: four million. It seems to us that he is right, and therefore we prefer to call our stories “Four Million.”
New York then had four million inhabitants, and all these four million seemed equally worthy of attention to O. Henry. He is the poet of four million; that is, the entire American democracy. After this book, O. Henry became famous throughout America. In 1907 he published two books of stories: "The Seasoned Lamp" and "The Heart of the West"; in 1908 there were also two - “Voice of the City” and “Delicate Rogue”; in 1909, again two - “Roads of Doom” and “Privileges”, in 1910 again two - “Exclusively on Business” and “Whirlpools”. Writing short stories did not satisfy him; he conceived a big novel. He said: “Everything I’ve written so far is just self-indulgence, a test of the pen, compared to what I’ll write in a year.” But a year later he was unable to write anything: he was overtired, began to suffer from insomnia, went south, did not recover, and returned to New York completely broken. He was taken to the Polyclinic on Thirty-fourth Street. He knew that he was going to die, and he spoke about it with a smile. In the clinic, he joked, lay in full consciousness - clear and joyful. On Sunday morning he said: “Light a fire, I do not intend to die in the dark,” and a minute later he died - on June 5, 1910.
A description of O. Henry as a writer will be given in the coming issues of “Modern West”, when the Russian reader becomes more familiar with his works.
K. Chukovsky
1 O. Henry Biography, by Alphonso Smith, Roe Professor of English at the University of Virginia Garden City, N.-Y., and Toronto.